Day two of E3 2013 is all done. While I managed to fit in thirteen awesome titles, some definitely stood head and shoulders above the rest. Which ones were winners and which ones didn’t make the cut? Read on to find out!

1. Watch Dogs This was one of my favorite reveals at E3 last year. It was really the first game to show what I expected a true “next gen” title to be. Awesome cityscapes, interactive worlds, and an interesting story with a pretty crazy game mechanic. Essentially, the player is a super hacker in the middle of Chicago. He’s trying to track down his sister for some reason (the developers haven’t specified why). However, he’s being tailed by cops and “fixers”. I believe fixers are some sort of private mercenaries hired by the Bloom Corporation (the game’s main antagonist force), but again the developers haven’t specifically said.

Gotcha!

The demo showed us all of what was showed at Ubisoft’s conference. That included using the cameras to help your friend get away from the fixers and a second player using the tablet to try and help the main player escape. This seems like a pretty useless feature, since the tablet user doesn’t actually get to interact with the environment. He can activate barriers or EMP helicopters, but otherwise his ability to get involved in the story is extremely limited. Unless the tablet user can help multiple friends at once while they play, I don’t see much reason to use this feature. The demo also showed us the multiplayer. If the player chooses, other users can enter his world as he plays. The player is not told when nor where these players enter. The other players are tasked with trying to hack the main player and hide stealthily within the environment while the hack proceeds. After that, the player must try and identify and kill the hacker. It can get pretty hectic, but it definitely fits better within the gamespace than most multiplayer modes from other similar games. My one concern is whether or not there will be enough for the player to do in the general environment. The player will be able to stop crimes in progress and hack into region-based servers to gain access to that region’s tech, but other than that the game didn’t really say what the player could do. It would be very disappointing to have such a large world and little reason for the player to move around other than to complete main missions and gain region-based morality points.

2. Kingdom Hearts 1.5 HD Since Kingdom Hearts 3 is coming out and I have yet to play the original games, this was definitely on my list to try. Unfortunately, the demo seemed to assume that the player was already familiar with the play style of Kingdom Hearts. As a result, I was pretty lost. It wasn’t very frustrating, but I just had no idea what was going on. The meat of the story wasn’t accurately portrayed in such a short time, so I feel like I missed out on understanding something that I knew would be much more captivating than the demo portrayed. I will still buy this game, but as a result of the somewhat disappointing demo I will probably wait longer than I would have originally.

3. Destiny I have been somewhat skeptical about Destiny. The environments look amazing, but so far the game lacks serious substance. The demonstrations at the conference and that I saw today clearly emphasize the cooperative combat, but even with other players the game felt very empty at times. The demos showed the new weapons the player could find for killing enemies, but other than that there doesn’t seem to be anything else to pick up. This kills much of my motivation for exploration, which is extremely unfortunate considering the expansive landscapes the developers have been touting. As with other games that I saw today, I need to know that the developers are filling their vast landscapes with reasons for me to go exploring.

So pretty. So vast. So empty.

The arkfall events (called something different for Destiny, but it reminded me a lot of Defiance) seem interesting but aren’t nearly as large as other similar MMOs. I don’t know how many players will be able to take place at once, but if it’s only eight players things will seem relatively empty. The ratio of enemies to players was surprisingly small. Again, this is just a demo, so it may get better in the future, but it seemed like I was shown so little substance despite being shown so much creativity.

4. Murdered: Soul Suspect I first saw this game advertised via the banners at E3. It interested me enough to actively search out this title and find out what it was about. I’m glad that I did. This game is a detective style adventure game where the player has to put together pieces of evidence in order to try and figure out who killed him and why. Yes, the player is dead. In fact, the player is a ghost. So in addition to solving his own murder, he can go about trying to help other ghosts.

I'm a scary ghost!

It was actually a very interesting game. It seems relatively simple overall, but there are good opportunities for exploration and the game is designed to make the player think a bit. This one rated surprisingly high on my list of games that I saw today. If you liked LA Noire, I would highly recommend looking into this game.

5. Mad Max I have to admit that I have never seen a Mad Max movie. I know they were rough, tough, classic 80s action movies, but other than that I’m pretty much completely devoid of knowledge on the subject. Evidently there is going to be a reboot movie coming up within the next few years, but evidently this title is unrelated to that. This is a completely separate story from any of the movies, which is good because movie-based games are usually terrible.

These cars blow up faster than a Pinto.

The demonstration didn’t explain a whole lot about the story, but it did emphasize how much time the developers were putting into vehicular combat. The game is a gigantic open world that the player will spend countless hours travelling via a fully customizable car. The developers tried to emphasize that there will not be a “best” customization, and that instead it will push players to try and pick a car based on their own style. Unfortunately, that seemed a bit shallow because the environment heavily favored cars that could drive offroad and that were outfitted to deal and withstand heavy punishment. Lighter, faster vehicles seemed to be severely outclassed by the other cars in the wasteland. As with Watch Dogs, my biggest concern with Mad Max is the tendency for developers to create huge open areas to explore and very little to do. This is especially true for Mad Max, since it reminds me a lot of Rage (another disappointingly sparse title). I will be keeping an eye on this game, but I’m still not convinced that this is worth buying any time soon after its release.

6. Thief The original Thief came out in the late 90’s, so seeing a reboot of the franchise can be either very good or very bad. Square Enix (the game’s publisher) has a history of releasing good reboots (Tomb Raider, for example), so this game has that going for it. Unfortunately, while the gameplay looked smooth, this game has one somewhat fatal flaw. It looked very similar to Dishonored, but lacked a lot of what made Dishonored fun. While the sneaking part of Thief’s missions is only “recommended”, the number of weapons and offensive abilities available to the player seemed to pale in comparison to those in Dishonored. While the levels in Thief did give the player the ability to choose how to approach a target, it seemed much more linear than Dishonored. And while Dishonored gave the player a number of ways to deal with a target, Thief only gives the player one.

You can't blink out of this one.

I’m not completely writing off this game just yet, but it has a long uphill battle to convince me that it is worth paying full price. Right now it just seems unnecessarily slow, linear, and boring.

7. Company of Heroes 2 I have to confess that while I own the previous Company of Heroes game and its expansion packs, I have yet to actually install it and try it. Fortunately, Company of Heroes 2’s demo was easy to pick up and try. In the campaign, players will play as the Russians during World War II. It’s a very different take on the war that has already been played to death by too many games. The nice thing is that, while this is a real-time strategy game, base management is almost non-existent. Instead, combat and tactics are given a much greater emphasis. While massing my troops together and rushing my enemies worked during the demo, I have a feeling that careful combat and more tactical ways of approaching and eliminating enemies will be better when I go through the real campaign.

Russians are always so cold.

I didn’t get a chance to play the multiplayer (which is currently beta testing on Steam). The only thing I hope for the single player is that the game emphasizes the historical content of the battles much more than what it did during the demo. I like to get a little bit of a history lesson while I play historically accurate games.

8. Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare This was a total surprise to me. I had seen the ads for this game in the days leading up to E3, but I thought this was going to be Plants vs. Zombies 2. I was completely surprised when it turned out to be a different game entirely. Fortunately it retains much of the cartoonish humor of the mobile game while adding a very interesting cooperative multiplayer element. The game seems to merge the third person shooter with the tower defense, but there doesn’t seem to be anything that the players will be actively defending. And the zombies move fast, so players will have to be much more responsive than they are on the mobile version.

The one thing I’m not sure about yet is whether this will be a full retail title or whether it will be a downloadable title available on the Xbox Live Arcade and the PSN (and Origin, of course). The developers wouldn’t tell me. I would probably pay $15 for it (depending on how much content there was), but I definitely wouldn’t pay $60.

9. Assassin’s Creed 4 If you have seen the gameplay demonstration that was shown at the Ubisoft E3 reveal, you saw exactly what I did. If you haven’t seen it but have played Assassin’s Creed 3, you’ll know pretty much everything to expect. The gameplay hasn’t changed very much from the last game. There were only two obviously new things that the developers showed off. The first is the increased emphasis on stealth, although from what I saw that didn’t seem any greater than what was done in Assassin’s Creed 3. The other is the ability to move seamlessly from land to ship without any loading screen. This was a pretty cool feature, but the demo seemed to be a very scripted event. How many times the player will actually go from land to ship without any sort of loading screen or transition remains to be seen.

I'm a pirate yarrrr.

10. The Crew The Ubisoft demonstration for this game made me very interested. The trailer showed off cop chases and cooperative team combat in an open world racing game. Unfortunately, the game’s network went down just before I got a chance to test it. This meant that I had to test the solo mode for the game, which was definitely a good thing. The solo mode for this game is abysmally boring. The world is huge, but so much of the fun of the game is completely lost when there are no players helping you complete the missions. It felt like a much less interesting version of Need for Speed: Most Wanted (the most recent one). If I wanted to play something like this alone, I’d probably go back to that instead of getting The Crew.

But, if you can find a few friends to be in your crew, this game is a lot of fun. Provided those friends know how to play this game. Good teamwork is required, so picking up novices and holding their hand as they learn how to effectively race and take down targets will definitely be a pain. With all of these potential problems, I’ll likely avoid the game unless I can find a good set of friends to play with me.

11. Dying Light Dying Light is a first person zombie survival game that looks and feels almost exactly like Dead Island. The player will attack zombies in a very similar manner and craft new items in almost exactly the same way. In fact, one of the items used in the demonstration was exactly the same as a craftable item in Dead Island (machete with a battery for electricity damage).

Time to go!

But that isn’t quite the whole story. The game emphasizes free running and mobility over the typically slow and clumsy controls of Dead Island. The player is encouraged to cause distractions and run away from groups of zombies instead of trying to tackle them all head-on. And the game includes a realistic day-night cycle. You don’t want to be out at night. There are some insane zombies that will find you and rip you to shreds at night. But they only come out at night, so as long as you stay in safe houses during that time you should be okay. This will definitely be interesting enough to pick up. And considering how similar it is to Dead Island, I know a few friends that will instantly start drooling over this title.

12. Batman: Arkham Origins I was a bit skeptical about this game. Prequels usually have a lot of problems since they’re trying to keep within the continuity of the previous games in the series. On the plus side, Batman: Arkham Origins is almost exactly the same game as Arkham City, but with a much larger environment. On the minus side, there was almost a complete lack of any real innovation. The demo showed off a new weapon type, the new fast travel system, the new story, and some of the new environment. The story seemed pretty interesting since it gives a great insight into Batman’s early history. However, I’m not sure if it will be able to stand up against its predecessors. I know I will get it eventually, but it isn’t high on my list right now.

I'm Batman.

13. Final Fantasy XIII: Lightning Returns I was surprised at how much I liked this game. It definitely wasn’t the best game at E3, but it was a lot better than I expected. After I got over the ridiculous dialog, the awkward names, and the fact that Lightning’s outfits left very little to the imagination, I definitely liked how the game merged the modern 3D action game style with the classic 2D encounter style. Basically, the player can see enemies floating around in the environment. When the player attacks the enemy (or vice versa), both the player and the enemy (or enemies) will be taken into an area style area to fight. The player has to use a combination of powers and power sets to take down the enemies in the most efficient and effective way possible. It takes time to recharge mana and energy, so the player can’t just button mash forever. If I took more time, I’m sure I’d be able to figure out the best strategy.

This game will probably be much more appreciated by Final Fantasy fans than by me, but I thought it was worth my time to try.

Well, that’s it for day two! There are still a good number of games left to try. After that, I’ll soon be making my ultimate decision on a new console! So exciting!